Jackie
Chan’s Asian Hawk character from Armour
of God is back—sort of. He is known as a “JC” now (a heavy set of initials
if ever there was), but he is in the same treasure hunting business. Such
details hardly matter. Either way it is Jackie Chan giving his all to please
audiences as action star, action choreographer, co-writer, and director of Chinese Zodiac (a.k.a. CZ12, trailer here), which
releases today on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital platforms from Universal Studios
Home Entertainment.
During
the Second Opium War, the French and British largely razed the Old Summer
Palace. (Time, civil wars, and the Cultural Revolution would eventually finish the job.) On that day of Imperialistic excess, twelve Chinese Zodiac statues
were indeed plundered. Lost for well over a century, they have suddenly hit the market
one-by-one. At least, that is the MacGuffin that swings JC/Hawk into action. The
antiquities holding firm MC Corp hires JC and his team to track down the seven
heads they have not yet auctioned. They are also the bad guys. No, it does not
make much sense, but it gives Chan plenty of opportunity to scamper across
roofs, get chased by dogs, and fight pirates.
Whatever,
nobody is going to watch CZ12 for the
intricate plotting. The whole attraction is the acrobatic action and elaborate
stunts Chan can evidently still pull off at a youthful fifty-eight years. He
may have slowed down a little, considering most of the painful outtakes shown
during the closing credits come from previous films, but he still looks like
the real deal leaping and fighting.
The
opening sequence, involving JC’s getaway from a Russian military base through
the use of a luge-like human roller-ball suit, might sound a little goofy, but
the execution is extremely cinematic (and suddenly timely). It also memorably
introduces former Chinese taekwondo champion turned actress and model Zhang
Lanxin as CZ12’s secondary action
figure. There is also plenty of cat burglary, a huge action spectacle involving
a massive shipwreck that serves as the centerpiece, and a climatic skydiving throwdown
that looks cool but ends a bit precipitously. However, the best sequence is a
good, old fashioned rumble between JC and a small army of henchmen.
When
Jackie Chan mixes it up, CZ12 is on
solid ground, even though the villains (led by Oliver Platt) are a bit weak.
Since they frequently assure JC they have no intention of killing anyone, it
rather minimizes the stakes (but at least as movie businessmen go, they are
only mildly nefarious). Chan’s periodic soap-boxing to advocate restitution of
national relics is somewhat more distractingly problematic. It all seems a
little ironic considering his notorious assertion that the Chinese people are
too anarchic and “need to be controlled.” In that case, would not China’s
dynastic treasures be better off in a stodgy western institution, like the
British Museum?
